Senior Capstone ProjectThermoelectric Cooling of Small Satellites

The Basics

Small satellites are becoming increasingly more complex with their missions and their payloads. Many of these missions are remote sensing missions, where sensitive payloads are becoming more precise and are able to gather higher quality data for scientists and various industries, like agriculture. Spectral data is a major data output from cubesats and small satellites, but the quality and resolution of spectral data is limited by the Signal-to-Noise ratio of the onboard CMOS or CCD sensor. Signal-to-Nosie is correlated to sensor temperature with dark noise, noise associated with heat. The graph to the left shows how the Signal-to-Noise ratio increases with temperature.Additionally, sensors need to be cooled to detect certain ranges of the infrared range. Cooling small satellite sensors is a clear problem to increase quality and performance.

Thermoelectric Module

The cooling of the satellite sensors is a clear need. Current solutions include cryocoolers and purely passive options like heat sinks. Heat sinks are not able to cool below ambient temperatures, which makes passive options like heat sinks not useful. Cryocoolers are bulky, very mechanical, and increases risk for small satellites.

A thermoelectric cooler (TEC) is a solid-state option, which reduces risk to the payload and satellite. The TEC utilizes the Peliter effect to move heat from one side to the other side of the module. The lack of moving parts makes this system very viable for use in space and satellites.